Sandbanks Bay and Poole Park

The weather has been fantastic recently in the UK for landscape photography.  The sky is generally a cheerful blue with a few wispy clouds to give some interest, and the sunsets are fairly colourful.  I've been getting out a fair bit recently in the evenings - sunset is around 21:15 so to be out with the camera at least an hour either side of that give an opportunity to capture a wide range of lighting conditions in the shots.

Holes Bay Boat

An Evening in Hamworthy

This is another journal style post about an evening out a few weeks ago to take sunset landscape shots.  The original intention was to go to the beach somewhere between Sandbanks and Bournemouth as I wanted some sea, sand and beach hut shots, but a quick play with The Photographers Ephemeris (a brilliant and free tool: http://stephentrainor.com/tools) showed that the sun would be setting behind the cliffs and I think the beach would just be in the shadow long before sunset.  So when I went out with a friend on this evening, we headed towards Hamworthy to see what we could find.

Sundown at Hamworthy

Shots from Goodwood

Thanks to Lotus, I got some free tickets to the first Moving Motor Show at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on July 1st this year.  I've never been to Goodwood FoS before, and although the Moving Motor Show day was geared towards manufacturers exhibiting products and using the track for test drives, it was a great day with so much to see.

Back to Landscapes

Although I've had an interest in photography for more than 10 years, it didn't really get serious until I bought my first DSLR in early 2007.  Since then, I've tried many different types of photography and over the last few months have spent quite a bit of time shooting people and trying to get a feel for using shallow DoF in images.  Recently, though, with the beautiful weather in the UK and late sunset times, I've been out with tripod, graduated ND filters and remote release - back to what is probably my favourite type of photography.

Coffe Arithmetic

A bit of maths with coffee:

Lasers

I have always had a keen interest in lasers - to be honest with light in general, but the purity and brilliance of laser light holds something special.  My uncle (who is no longer with us) spent years working with lasers for all sorts of reasons - everything from a few milliwatt (Helium Neon) up to 2W Argon Ion lasers which on one occasion led to him accidentally cutting his tie in half! - and I spent a lot of time learning from him.

I've owned quite a few lasers - I was gifted a 2mW HeNe laser first off, and I've had quite a few standard laser pointers (all red diode lasers).  But in the last few days I've finally got hold of a couple of diode lasers that are a bit different from the norm - a 20mW green, and a 205mW red one.

7D Macro - Summary after several shoots

I've spent several hours out now taking macro shots with the Canon 100mm f2.8 (non-L) lens on my 7D, and I wanted to showcase my favourite images and give a bit of technical detail about how I've taken them.